"American Justice"

For five weeks, Judge Chester R. Shook of Cincinnati, and a jury of ten men and two women, listened to stout, baldheaded, raucous George Remus, attorney, defend stout, baldheaded raucous George Remus, accused of murder. The two Messrs. Remus were physically one-and-the-same man, but Judge Shook was impotent to prevent them from acting as separate entities in his courtroom, where they convinced the jury that still a third stout, baldheaded, raucous George Remus had committed the murder.

The third Mr. Remus was said to be the second Mr. Remus while insane, i. e. "beside himself", with jealousy, fear and indignation. The first Mr. Remus (attorney) explained that the second Mr. Remus (defendant) had been cuckolded, and his life plotted against, while he was serving a penitentiary term for bootlegging. One Franklin L. Dodge, onetime Prohibition agent, was named as cuckoldor. Attorney Remus argued that Defendant Remus had become Murderer Remus by unbearable provocation from Mr. Dodge and Mrs. Remus and that Defendant Remus had, therefore, been made not only a millionaire but also a martyr by Prohibition.

The jury sympathized entirely and last week, after 19 minutes deliberation, decided that Defendant Remus had been temporarily insane and was not guilty. "American justice! I thank you!" shouted stout, baldheaded, raucous Mr. Remus.

The jurors were so touched by Defendant Remus's description of how he spent last Christmas in prison that they petitioned to have him set free at once without waiting for the test, required by law, to see if he was sane enough to be at large. Refusal of this petition did not daunt Mr. Remus. He received kisses and congratulations from the jurors in his cell and hysterically pledged the rest of his life to "stifling the insult which is upon our statutes known as the National Prohibition Act."

Shapespeare or Pirandello might have invented such a performance, but it was more than most observers could stomach. Since Mr. Remus had come to Cincinnati from Chicago, the

Cincinnati Post said: "A Chicago bootlegger gets a Chicago verdict." The New York World called it "a burlesque ... a travesty ... a disgrace to the State of Ohio."

More interesting than such statements was what the prosecution chief said. The prosecution chief was Charles Phelps Taft II, Prosecuting Attorney of Hamilton County, son of the Chief Justice of the U. S. Supreme Court. It had been his first case of nationwide prominence and during it he had constantly been baited, badgered, insulted by Lawyer-'Legger Remus.

Tall, deliberate, cheerful, Prosecutor Taft said: "As for our being licked, that doesn't matter. We've been licked before and can stand it."

In the Bronx

By a margin no wider than desirable, the U. S. last week escaped a replica (with variations) of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. In the Bronx (outlying borough of New York City) a jury acquitted one Calogero Greco and one Donate Carillo of the murders of one Joseph Carisi and one Nicholas Amoroso last Memorial Day. The Messrs. Carisi and Amoroso, members of the Fascist League of America, had been on their way to join Fascist comrades in a parade. The Messrs. Greco and Carillo, hot antiFascists, were alleged to have set upon them at the foot of an elevated railway staircase and jabbed them, stabbed them, shot them to death.

The incident might have been confined to a few babbling Italian quarters, but for the alertness of liberty-loving Lawyer Arthur Garfield Hays and other advocates of the Sacco-Vanzetti brief in Massachusetts' recent spectacle.

Lawyer Hays and colleagues sniffed collusion between Tammany Hall and Fascist Italy. A defense fund was raised. Witnesses were guarded and supported. Pre-trial statements by the defense promised demonstrations on a scale that would dwarf the Sacco-Vanzetti spectacle if it were proved, as the defense said convictions would prove, that the Fascist League of America had enlisted pressure from the political overlords of the biggest city in the U. S.

But such demonstrations were averted. The Greco-Carillo defense committee enlisted the services of Lawyer Clarence Darrow of Chicago. Last week, in the tawdry Bronx courtroom, Lawyer Darrow, one of the most dangerous lions of the U. S. bar, exercised the expressive seams in his face, hunched his expressively hulking shoulders, intoned his expressive drawl, until he convinced 12 jurors who had no interest in the political passions of "little Italy" that Italian political passions were the motives underlying the prosecution; that the prosecution's case rested solely upon identification of a rear-view of one of the alleged murderers, the identifier being a Fascist organizer who hated the very benches the defendants sat on. The jurors acquitted the Messrs. Greco and Carillo after eight hours' deliberation.